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We are playing with the idea of creating an open-sourse report service that will call on and make use of IATI data from more than one donor.

It would be great to have something to show already in Busan but with such a deadline we want to avoid running into already know dead-ends. We would really appreciate to hear about any experiences on this topic. Why has IATI chosen leave the presentation of data to intermediaries?

So before we take on such a task we want to lift the question to make sure that we aren't in over our heads.

Great to hear about your planned project. This is really timely. Whilst the major focus of the IATI project up until now has been on sourcing data and supporting organisations to provide the information, we're in the process of getting more work underway to support re-use of the data. The AidInfoLabs.org site is where we've been starting to collect ideas, examples and shared source code (http://www.github.com/aidinfolabs) for people re-using the data. That's being very actively developed right now.

As I understand, it's been a principle of the project so far that IATI isn't about building a single database, but is about supporting standard ways of sharing data - so it's not looking to provide one set 'central' interface, but trying to support different intermediaries to build interfaces and tools that meet the needs of the communities they are working with.

However, there are quite a few bits underway that might be useful:

To help explore data from different donor files I've been experimenting with the eXist-db XML database and now have scripts that will load up all the data from the IATI Registry into eXist, and we're working on collecting a library of XSLT style-sheets that can be applied to transform the data into different formats (e.g. CSV; JSON etc.)

I'll be blogging on AidInfoLabs about that shortly, but happy to chat about the details more as well as I think this might be a useful foundation for different tools that want to provide interfaces across the data.

I've had a chat with Bill, and we're thinking we also need to start some work on documenting some of the considerations to make when using the data - things like how to handle the different dates available in files, and ways of coping with missing data from different donors ways of representing things. We'll get a thread going here on the knowledge base about that...

We are thinking about what other prototype interfaces onto the data might be useful to see created - and may be looking to help the development of other prototypes - so happy to explore how this could support your plans...

Maybe if you've got some more details of what the report service idea might involve we can see where else there are overlaps to help make a November deadline a joy rather than a challenge :)